Tim Dyson has an interesting post on his Technology PR blog about the present economics of PR and potential areas for innovations. Dyson advocates embracing the changing landscape of PR and offers some suggestions on benefitting from these changes.

Potential areas for innovation include a new look at fixed fee engagements. In this area agencies can focus more on the value of the problem they are solving for their clients and less on the ingredients they have to bring together to generate a solution. Fixed fees are now standard in the advertising world. It seems only logical that the PR world will end up following a similar path in time. Other areas for innovation are in the use of technology to deliver aspects of the service. Here PR firms can and should, take a leaf out of the professional services industries’ book and find ways of automating huge chunks of the process. They should also look at ways in which technology can improve both the client experience but also the quality and effectiveness of the service offered. A good, albeit low level, example here would be the industry starting to work together to make better use of technologies such as wikis for such items as media and analyst databases.

We're pretty strong believers in making use of new technology. One thing we've found particularly beneficial for managing projects and client accounts is Basecampthe web-based project management tool. We can keep track of everything we're working on and allow our clients access to some or all of their projects. We've been using Basecamp for around 6 months now and it's proved to be quite useful and besides, who doesn't like to check off a milestone once it's completed.